As someone who works with Rails and Laravel, one of the huge benefits I find working with PHP/Laravel are the speed and consistency of releases. PHP seems to release versions more frequently, and Laravel tags every week. It means there's much less lead time to work with new features/functionality as it becomes available (when it's stable, rather than running on edge).
I once came back to a Laravel project after just one year of working on other projects and had to go through several upgrade guides just to stay up to date. Most changes were quite trivial (yet annoying to make), like namespace changes and other things that should probably have been weeded out before ever making it into a release... It’s why I prefer Symfony if I absolutely had to work with PHP nowadays.
Laravel did release major versions every 6 months in the past. The changes have not been much and https://laravelshift.com is able to it automatically.
They‘ve now changed to yearly major releases because not everyone is able to upgrade every 6 months.
